Electronic mail (hereinafter email) has become a popular and in some cases, indispensable, communication tool for individuals and organizations. Despite its effectiveness for conveying information, email also poses security risks due to its inherent private or even confidential nature. For example, assuming company A has communicated with its bankers via emails regarding a buyout of company B, inability to maintain the confidentiality of these emails could potentially terminate the transaction and adversely affect company A's competitive position in its marketplace.
Some solutions have been proposed and implemented to preserve confidentiality of an email. One solution simply notifies a recipient of an email the confidentiality nature of email and assumes that the recipient would act appropriately and protectively of the email in response. Another solution assigns a password to the content of an email so that a recipient of the email can only read the content if he or she has the proper password.
The mentioned approaches have one major shortcoming. Specifically, an author of an email under either approach has no control over the email after the transmission of the email. As a result, when the recipient redistributes the content of that email to another without following the same security procedures as the author (i.e. notifying or assigning a password), the confidentiality of the email is no longer adequately protected. Another security breach could occur when the recipient saves the email to a floppy disk and subsequently loses the floppy disk.
As has been demonstrated, an improved method and an apparatus are needed to remedy the discussed shortcoming.